For what it's worth

We stayed at this hotel in late October 2006, booked through Greenbee. They described it as a "Charming hotel near public gardens" and list it as Three-Star (which they call "Quality" - better than "Value" and lower than "Superior"). The hotel is listed as "Limited First Class" by the Golden Tulip marketing chain ("limited" meaning that it lacks some services such as full-service restaurants).

We were very disappointed. Perhaps that was because we had unreasonable expectations - form your own opinion. Here are a few of our photos to show features - as at the date of our visit - that the hotel and Greenbee didn't seem to have room for on their websites.

The hotel’s apparent attitude to quality is perhaps best summed up by the notices around the hotel (but only visible after check-in) that warn: “Sorry for some deficient services. We are renewing our hotel”

To find temporary notices like this when you arrive (but without having been warned in advance) would be disappointing.

To find that the hotel had gone to the trouble of having the message engraved onto gold-painted notices and fixed permanently to the walls – that signifies a much more fundamental acceptance of customer disappointment.

At the Nazioni, those notices were not only permanently fixed, they had been there long enough to display streaks of paint that showed that they had been there since before the last round of decoration.

This is is the bathroom in Room 402 (two rooms making a "quad room" sharing one bathroom, potentially an excellent configuration for a family).

The original dark-pink tiles have been painted over with light-pink paint, but that has not adhered very well, and it has come off in places. Indeed, the tiles have come off altogether in places, and others are broken. Not my idea of "Quality" or "Limited First Class".






Warning for those with sensitive noses - we couldn't see or hear any sign of external ventilation in the (fully internal) bathroom for 402 (or 501) - it appears that the only way that "unpleasant bathroom smells" are going to disappear is by seeping into the bedrooms.







The bathroom (and bedroom) doors within Room 402 did not close because the frames were broken. The external door was fine, but if parents had any ideas of romance without their kids as an audience, they would be disappointed here.












Upon complaint, we were moved to Room 501, which wasn't a lot better. The doors did close, but there were no bedside lights (power sockets but no power), and the bathroom was both tatty...











... and had an electrical socket about 500mm from the basin (presumably legal in Italy even if it wouldn't be in the UK) which was coming out of the wall - a potentially fatal risk for young children.















Breakfast was also a severe disappointment - on our first morning I was almost sick at the stench from the rancid butter – two consecutive portions were the same, and the whole batch was eventually replaced when I complained.

The lukewarm coffee was identifiable only by the label “coffee” on its flask – certainly instant, and possibly a mix of cheap coffee and other even lower-cost adulterants.

The Pineapple “drink” was over-sweetened and unpleasant. The “Breakfast Grapefruit” drink was what I can only describe as janitorial.

The ham had hard white bits in it, which appeared to be hoof or bone.

I can only comment on four rooms at the hotel. The two that we occupied were tatty and very different from those pictured on the website at the date of writing. We also saw room 508 which we were moved to (but then moved immediately out of because it was suddenly "unavailable") - this was nothing like the rooms on the website, but tidier (and the bathroom even had a fan).

When I demanded a room that matched the website, we were shown Room 303 - which does look like the website pictures, and we could have had this room if only the configuration (double bed, double sofa-bed) had suited our family. But we needed single beds for the kids, and the hotel could offer nothing of that quality in this configuration. (We had confirmed with the hotel that they could offer us a suitable configuration - before booking).

Upsides - good location (useful supermarket very close, but only open to 8pm; cheapish Pizza restaurant nearby), and aside from the tattiness, the rooms were at least cleaned properly.

So, form your own judgements. Some - or perhaps all - of the other rooms may be delightful. And perhaps other people will enjoy the breakfast more than we did.

Update 11th November 2006:
I complained to Greenbee about this, and their response has been much more like the John Lewis I thought I knew - they seem genuinely upset, and have refunded me 35% of the cost of the hotel, which feels fair.

Greenbee have promised to update me on the results of their investigations into the hotel, and I will add a note about these when I hear from them.

Update 8th January 2007:
No followup from Greenbee. They have removed the word "Charming" from their description but are still offering the hotel, and still grading it as a "Quality" hotel. They do have a very rudimentary user scoring system (which shows that I am by no means the only unhappy user of this hotel) but it doesn't allow any user commentary - just points scores.

So - despite what one might expect from the John Lewis Partnership, you can still end up in a grotty hotel through Greenbee - they may offer convenience and price-negotiation muscle, but I won't be relying on their assessment of quality in future.

Things I wish I'd asked before buying ...

... how easy is it to keep an eye on remaining disk space?

Our Panasonic DMR-EH50 has been good overall, but there is no "in your face" display of remaining disk space. Not a problem if you are a very well-disciplined individual who will control all recordings yourself. Probably not a big problem if you are only ever going to schedule recordings using the machine's own timer.

But one of the brilliant features of this machine is that it cooperates with a Panasonic Digibox so that (if set appropriately) it will automatically record any programs that you choose for Autoview on Sky. That makes it nearly as easy as a Skyplus unit (without the need to subscribe to Sky, eg for those taking "FreeSat from Sky"). But in this mode, there can be no warning about disk space - because the recorder doesn't know what the Digibox is going to ask it to record until the instruction arrives.

But here comes the problem. If anyone else in the household might schedule recordings that you hadn't reckoned on, then without a display that keeps reminding you of remaining time, you may end up losing recordings because there isn't enough disk space left.

Yes, the Panasonic will tell you the time left - if you know where to look, but you have to seek it out. I wish it would show the remaining time on its display when in Standby, and on the main screen when you are reviewing the programs already on disk.

But otherwise this is a neat machine. And don't be put off by the restriction that you can only do one "partial erase" in the middle of a programme (eg to cut out a commercial break) - you can split titles in two as many times as you need.

Here is a solution that I developed for our village Primary School, and detail here in the hope it might be of use to others.

The Situation:
A small school with a single phone line, where there are substantial parts of the week when the only staff are teaching.

The Problem:
What to do when the phone rings?

Do the staff interrupt teaching to answer the call - which will usually be non-urgent? Or do they leave it, and risk missing the occasional crucially urgent call? (Invent your own scenario for this, but as an extreme example, it might just be a hospital needing to call urgently to arrange for a child to be taken to the bedside of an injured parent)

The Solution:
Subscribe to BT's Twin Talk Service. This keeps the single phone line, but gives you an extra phone number, which rings the same line, but with a different ring pattern (single, long ring, US-style). You buy a pair of special adapters that switch phone calls depending on the ring-pattern. You then plug an answerphone into the adapter that connects calls on the "normal" number - and record a message that says:

"Sorry we can't answer your call at the moment. If you are calling during school hours, this will be because all staff are busy teaching. If you really HAVE to interrupt them, please dial again on 01xxx xxxxxx, otherwise please leave a message and we will get back to you as soon as we are free".

Then connect the adapter that answers the "special" ringtone to your phone (or phones) in the school.

When you have no admin cover, set the Answerphone ON before you start teaching. You'll hear incoming calls ring a couple of times with the normal pattern before the answerphone cuts in. If the phone rings with a single-long ring (and it will continue to ring, because the answering machine won't be getting this call) then you know it is an urgent call and you need to stop teaching and answer it.

All phones can still make outgoing calls in the normal way.

It's worked well for several years in our school.

Costs (as of October 2006) - oneoff costs of about £35 for the pair of adapters, and about £25 per year extra on your phone bill.

Links:

http://www.twintalkhelp.com/tt_main.htm for BT's TwinTalk service
http://www.beststuff.co.uk/bt_twin_talk.htm for the adapters

2005 saw a big change to licensing law in the UK - a clumsy set of new rules that make it a misery to offer a glass of wine at a village-hall event.

And not only are the rules unfriendly, they are attrociously explained and presented. Hundreds of local authorities have had half-hearted attempts to expain the rules - but I couldn't find any simple explanation of the rules applying to our village hall here in Derbyshire.

So, I've drawn up a flowchart - which I've checked with the local licensing authority. Their advice was against making anything public, in case I could be seen to encourage people to skirt around the rules. But they did advise that the content was correct - for this area at least.

If you promise that your intentions are honorable, then I can let you into the secret of how to decide whether you need to apply for an extra licence (Temporary Events Notice or TEN) for that event at your village hall which already has a licence for entertainment but not for alcohol.

Please understand that I have only checked this with Derbyshire Dales District Council, and that other local authorities may interpret the same rules in different ways. Perhaps you could send them a link to the flowchart and ask them whether it is correct for your area (or, even better, publish their own).

If you accept the limitations and caveats, you can find the flowchart here.

Applying for voluntary organisation grants involves far too much form-filling anyway, but I get particularly upset at having to fill in badly-designed forms, created by badly-trained (or perhaps just lazy) "Word" users.

In response to a neighbour's request for help with filling in tick-boxes in Word forms (or "check-boxes" in US English), I created a one-page note on how to do it. Hope it helps reduce the pain for others too.